Coupa’s cloud-native Business Spend Management
(BSM) platform provides end-to-end processes
that helps drive collaboration
across for every business leader from supply chain, procurement,
finance, treasury, compliance, and IT and supply chain
leaders to help their companies to get the visibility and control they need to
spend smarter, mitigate risk, and improve
resilience. A
unified platform approach frees up IT from complex integrations to help
leaders deliver on these goals.
I am new to customer-supplier portals in my career. I use several different ones in my current role, including Ariba and Tipalti. To be honest, I don't really enjoy the user experience of any of them. I can see how larger companies may benefit from their services but for my current role submitting invoices on them and filling out vendor information requests seems somewhat clunky to me. When I'm in Coupa, the easiest, most non-clunky process for me is when I'm successfully connected with a customer who has successfully created their purchase order and I can easily upload my invoice to said PO. To me, emailing customer invoices directly to the customer from our invoicing system seems like the easier route of delivering an invoice. I suppose it is helpful and reassuring to know that an invoice has been successfully uploaded into a company's system rather than waiting to find out if your emailed invoice made it to the correct department for payment processing.
If you have a highly bureaucratic organization that is heavily focused on procurement, Emptoris can provide some value. It seemed to be very good at linking the contract information to procurement for better spend control. If you are trying to implement a standalone contract management solution that allows you to easily create contracts and store them in a central location, this isn't the tool for you. There doesn't appear to be a simplified implementation. In general, when a SaaS solution has a complicated and expensive implementation, I am very skeptical. This does not show that the vendor is trying to move customers forward on a single code base. If that many things need to be done during implementation, you are starting to customize the solution for every customer. This hurts the vendor's ability to scale and make improvements in the future.
Coupa is easy to use, however, we had to teach our end users about procurement. They are not used to conducting an RFP, onboarding a supplier, or preparing a PO. This is the change management that our employees had to be prepared to understand. The Shelby Group helped us with the implementation.
The hardest part was the integration between NetSuite and Coupa. We wanted to have a dynamic tight integration between the two solutions. If we adjusted the chart of accounts or added a new supplier we wanted it to be able to done in both systems and be available immediately in both systems. We used a partner called SuiteSkies to accomplish this dynamic integration.
We’ve been able to manage the implementation and maintenance with a very lean IT group.
Document protection - the Check Out contract feature is a great way to allow external parties to make modifications to contract language without the ability to accept those changes. Those redlines can then be imported back into Emptoris and reviewed or further modified as needed.
Notifications & reminders - you can trigger an email manually from within the system, or you can configure automated notifications andreminders to alert users when a new task is received or has aged a given amount of days, etc.
Interview wizard - there is a lot of value in the interview wizard. Administrators can configure screens with selecting options via check boxes, radio buttons, or typed-in values. Variables and conditions can be used to selectively populate fields within the contract or apply other options, making for a quick and convenient method to generate contracts conforming to corporate standards.
Field customization - administrators can customize a list of options for various fields including contract substatus, address type, and user created business term variables.
Approvals - many different options are available to configure approvals to trigger automatically upon presenting and/or executing the contract including specific individuals, one or more approver groups, or based upon various criteria including terms within the contract, type of contract, or the contract's owning organization.
Support Team - A little slow in responding. I think the tool is so configurable that they struggle with figuring out what is causing certain issues that are being submitted on the portal.
I'd love for the Sourcing Module to be able to support larger events. There seems to be a limit on the number of lines each event can support and as a growing retailer, our store count dictates we have room to grow and that each store is represented in the bid process.
Would like to see the ability to issue multiple POs for a single item to multiple locations. The tool may do this but I know I can't and it may be due to how we interface with our ERP.
Reporting, Emptoris comes with standard reports which can not always can be fit into our business. This needs to be improved. I hope Emptoris is addressing this issue in their latest releases.
Though the feature of editing language in MS word is excellent, loading MS word takes time.
There are a lot of new, exciting products coming out in every field and I believe that there is always something better right over the horizon. If it was my choice, I would review my usage of Emptoris and other software periodically to make sure I'm using the most efficient software possible.
The above rating for the overall support from Emptoris is for their product / product support, roll out training and refresher training / ongoing training, which is not only good but superior. There is no major or reconizable bad review that can be given to Emptoris at this point in time, from where is stands.
Concur was a lot easier and more user friendly for employees doing expense reports on their phone. That is not the case with Coupa. You must use your laptop to do expenses and our managers don't always have enough time to do that while out in the field working. This has caused some issues.
I am a fan of Ariba to be used for the entire lifecycle of Sourcing. From RFX's to cutting PO's. I feel Emptoris misses the boat on the idea of a "One Stop Shop" for all of your Sourcing/Purchasing needs
We won the 2005 Baseline Magazine Award for best ROI related to a technology implementation with an ROI 5544% (see 2005 Baseline ROI Awards, GlaxoSmithkline).
We always felt we could do "two times the work, with half the people and deliver double the savings".
